honeysuckers and great-winged butterflies.  Wandering about among the trees or crouching in the long and feathered grass were all varieties of game, from rhinocerotes down.  I saw a rhinoceros, buffalo (a large herd), eland, quagga, and sable antelope, the most beautiful of all the bucks, not to mention many smaller varieties of game, and three ostriches which scudded away at our approach like white drift before a gale.  So plentiful was the game that at last I could stand it no longer.  I had a single barrel sporting Martini with me in the litter, the “Express” being too cumbersome, and espying a beautiful fat eland rubbing himself under one of the oak-like trees, I jumped out of the litter, and proceeded to creep as near to him as I could.  He let me come within eighty yards, and then turned his head, and stared at me, preparatory to running away.  I lifted the rifle, and taking him about midway down the shoulder, for he was side on to me, fired.  I never made a cleaner shot or a better kill in all my small experience, for the great buck sprang right up into the air and fell dead.  The bearers, who had all halted to see the performance, gave a murmur of surprise, an unwonted compliment from these sullen people, who never appear to be surprised at anything, and a party of the guard at once ran off to cut the animal up.  As for myself, though I was longing to have a look at him, I sauntered back to my litter as though I had been in the habit of killing eland all my life, feeling that I had gone up several degrees in the estimation of the Amahagger, who looked on the whole thing as a very high-class manifestation of witchcraft.  As a matter of fact, however, I had never seen an eland in a wild state before.  Billali received me with enthusiasm.

“It is wonderful, my son the Baboon,” he cried; “wonderful!  Thou art a very great man, though so ugly.  Had I not seen, surely I would never have believed.  And thou sayest that thou wilt teach me to slay in this fashion?”

“Certainly, my father,” I said airily; “it is nothing.”

But all the same I firmly made up my mind that when “my father” Billali began to fire I would without fail lie down or take refuge behind a tree.

After this little incident nothing happened of any note till about an hour and a half before sundown, when we arrived beneath the shadow of the towering volcanic mass that I have already described.  It is quite impossible for me to describe its grim grandeur as it appeared to me while my patient bearers toiled along the bed of the ancient watercourse towards the spot where the rich brown-hued cliff shot up from precipice to precipice till its crown lost itself in a cloud.  All I can say is that it almost awed me by the intensity of its lonesome and most solemn greatness.  On we went up the bright and sunny slope, till at last the creeping shadows from above swallowed up its brightness, and presently we began to pass through a cutting hewn in the living rock.  Deeper and deeper grew this